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Need advice on local search optimization

I've found myself in a puzzling position and not quite sure which direction to push my current SEO project so if anyone who's done this particular type of SEO can offer some suggestions I'd be eternaly grateful.

I am currently working on a project for a Law Firm based in New Jersey. Lets say the town they are in is Garfield. What I really want to try and achieve is see them appearing in the number one spot whenever anyone within Garfield or the immediate area searches for a lawyer relating to the individuals need. E..g searches like "personal injury lawyers", "real estate lawyer".

The problem is I can see how I can easily make it to the number one position if people are specific and enter garfield in the search term but in reality they wouldn't be doing that.

An additional problem is that peoples ISP's in garfield aren't located in Garfield, in some cases they're as far away as Newark so when they're doing a search for 'real estate lawyer' google is bringing up results for the Newark based firms.

It seems using tools like market samurai to look at the traffic and competition is proving useless as searches like the ones I'm doing for local business are so closely tied to the ISP location I don't really know whether to target broad range searches like "Real Estate Lawyer", or to be really specific and include the town name in my page titles, H1 tags etc...

I hope I put across my dilemma and someone can help me chose which direction to go in..

5 Responses

I would definitely start out with the town name in the targeted keywords. For starters, it will get the ball rolling, and secondly, they're good keywords to optimise for - sure, they won't bring as much traffic as the more general non-geo terms, but they will likely have far less competition and be easier to rank for.

The ISP location targeting isn't really a variable you can influence, so it's best to put majority of your effort into that which you have a good level of control over (geo keywords). Additionally, it would make sense to mention that you are a Garfield firm regardless of whether you are using geo-keywords, so optimising for the geo-keywords really can't hurt.

Target the actual location on your site. If you can fudge a few other related geographic keywords into your content in a non-spammy way, do so, but focus on building up local search (listings and citations). As your local search rankings take hold, you will start appearing for proximity searches on Google Places.

Newark is a bit out of range - nothing much to be done about that. BUT if they search for "real estate lawyer Garfield" or surrounding towns, you want to show up in that Places map.

Great local search resource: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml. There was also a WBF on optimizing for local a few months back.

I've been adding the county name to my page titles thinking that would potentially bring in more traffic for searches from the outer areas.

Perhaps instead, adding the City name to the 'home' page title should be what I'm doing, but as I said I can't see people in Garfield searching for 'garfield attorney, or garfield lawyer' but if having the city name in in the title will affect the places result and indirectly the organic results then I'll give it a go. Well I'll try and keep the city and state on the title at least.

Last week I had my client pay for directory inclusion into a few of the BIG legal directories which hold a lot of authority so when google finally realises we're indexed on those, hopefully that will have a knock on effect too...

We're going through old unanswered questions and seeing if people still need help, or if you've gone ahead and implemented something and have anything interesting to report. Could you give us an update, or mark this question as answered? Thanks!

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